Schwalbe Marathon vs. Brown Glass: Flat Tire

Having suffered flat tires due to the tire liner chafing the tube, I’ve been running the Tour Easy without a rear tire liner since last year. Worked fine, up until the steering went mushy on a recent ride:

Brown glass chip - in tire

Ever notice how a rear flat means you can’t steer and a front flat means you can’t pedal? Works that way on our recumbents, too. Weird.

The chip probably came from a beer bottle tossed out a car window, those being the canonical source of brown glass on the road. That razor edge punched right through the Kevlar belt in the Schwalbe Marathon tire and just barely penetrated the tube:

Brown glass chip - detail

Fortunately, I discovered all that in a nice grassy area, patched the tube, fired a pair of CO2 capsules into the thing, and rode another 20 miles around the block on a lovely day. Unfortunately, I managed to pinch the tube while installing it, producing a very slow leak that flatted the tire by the next morning.

While repairing that flat in the comfort & convenience of the Basement Laboratory Repair Wing, I installed a tire liner with two strips of silicone tape over the ends to see if that reduces the abrasion:

Silicone tape on tire liner

Silicone tape doesn’t adhere to anything other than itself, so I added two duct tape snippets to hold them in position while I buttoned up the tire. And, yes, I left the transparent plastic cover tape in place, in the hope that it can’t do any harm.

Perhaps the inevitable slow leak will produce a flat in the garage, not on the road…

Related

This entry was posted on 2012-04-01, 07:09 and is filed under Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One a day, every day…

Redshifting

(Dis)Claimer

The FTC sez I'm supposed to tell you who's slipping me baksheesh for all the glowing reviews and testimonials you'll find herein [cough].

Unless otherwise noted:

I actually bought all this crap

I get exactly bupkis from anybody

The Baksheesh tag marks the first post involving anything that might look like a freebie.

Any ads you see come from Wordpress, not me; WP controls the number of ads, their content, and their positioning. Although I do get a cut of the ad revenue, this is not, based on current evidence, a get-rich-quick scheme. You can eliminate the ads by signing in to your WP account or using an ad blocker.